BookWoman

After a decade of amassing interviews of women born early in the 1900s, The Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project (www.olohp.org) has released its first book. A Gift of Age is a retelling of the stories of 22 lesbians, each offering a valuable glimpse into what it was like to be a lesbian during a unique and challenging period in American history.

It's hard to imagine today what it was like for a woman to live in a time when she had never heard the word lesbian, when there were no lesbian organizations, and when she had to be careful what she wore to the bar because a woman could be arrested simply for wearing pants or the wrong shoes. These are just some of the experiences shared in A Gift of Age: Old Lesbian Life Stories.